Drone On….

Time to Compose Your Own Drone

Now we are going to use what we have learned to compose our very own piece of Drone Music. This will be no more than five minutes in length – once you’ve decided how you’ll create your drone, try to incorporate three or more effects over time to show development of your initial idea.

A slowly changing drone can form the core of your work. Other elements can slowly evolve around it, interacting and transforming it over time. Remember to find a good balance between the development of your drone being too fast or too slow – seek input and feedback from peers where possible to check!

How can we do it?

When considering how to create your central drone, decide first whether you would like to take a real-world sound or a generated sound as your starting point.

If you choose a real-world sound, experiment with time-stretching to create a drone that changes over time. If you choose to use generated sounds, considering combing several pitched tones together to create a texture, before using automation and other modulating effects to develop your sound (see complex soundwaves for more information on pitched sounds and texture).

Once your central drone has been created, it’s time to consider how to develop it further. Examples of ways to develop your drone music composition might include:

Using automation to slowly introduce a range of different effects – for instance, gradually introducing modulation tools such as chorus
or flanging.

Adding other sounds that work with or against your drone – for instance, adding something that sounds totally different alongside your drone in order to contrast it, or adding another droning sound to compliments it.

Combining generated and time-stretched drones together to form new textures.

Using panning – of both your drone and the effects used to create it – to make use of the stereo space.

Reversing a time-stretched drone and playing it at the same time as the original – this can be especially interesting if automation is used to control the volume of each drone!

Modulation tools – where one sound is used to control another – can be used to slowly transform your drone sounds. Much like the example shown on Working with Drones, these could include:

Composition Tip

Considering finding a pace of development for your drone where something is always changing, but the overall sound of the drone seems to be almost stationary. If the right balance can be found, a drone can become captivating for long periods of time!

Recall also the drones which are a core part of many different types of musical instruments: Bagpipes, digeridoo, hurdy-gurdy, sarod.